[Politics]Biden's path out of the pandemic meets a Republican blockade

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https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/02/politics/biden-covid-omicron-republican-blockade/index.html

The entrenched Republican opposition to public health measures like vaccine and mask mandates has become one of the most difficult challenges facing President Joe Biden as he tries to fulfill his campaign promise to shut down the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

GOP leaders for months have simultaneously blamed Biden for failing to stamp out the virus while becoming the party hellbent on protecting the rights of the unvaccinated, even if that means putting the health and safety of all other Americans at risk. The Gordian knot they have created for Biden was on full display once again Wednesday when -- at virtually the same time that the first case of the Omicron variant was discovered in the US -- several Republican senators threatened to derail a stopgap measure that will avert a government shutdown Friday night unless their colleagues acceded to their demand for a vote on defunding Biden's vaccine requirement for large employers.

 

With unvaccinated Americans now about three times as likely to lean Republican as Democratic, Biden has found few influential GOP allies to help him push his case for vaccinations in deep red areas where Americans remain most resistant to getting them.

Summing up what has become a central talking point for GOP candidates as they head into the 2022 midterm primaries, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters on Wednesday that his party should "use every tool we have to protect people's rights, and the vaccine mandates are illegal, they're abusive and they're hurting this country."

 

 

But Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, warned that forcing a shutdown over a health measure intended to save lives would prove disastrous for the Republican Party: "I certainly hope they don't shut out the lights of this government (in) some kind of bold display of stupidity," he said.

 

Not all Senate Republicans are going along with the machinations of conservative lawmakers -- namely Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and Mike Lee of Utah -- who would like to force a showdown over vaccine mandates. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters Wednesday that he thought "we're gonna be OK" as he worked to avert a shutdown. But this latest battle exemplified the degree to which America's chances of emerging from the pandemic anytime soon will continue to be dampened by the partisan posturing over public health measures.

The contretemps on Capitol Hill is unfolding at a time when many Americans are anxious about whether they will be protected against the Omicron variant and just as Biden was slated to deliver a speech Thursday laying out his plans for the next phase of confronting the pandemic at the National Institutes of Health.

The President pushed ahead with the vaccine requirements for large employers (whose workers could opt out if they adhered to routine testing) and certain health care workers after countless public health experts argued that the only way to end the pandemic was by increasing vaccination rates. Biden has gotten little help from Republicans as he has pleaded for Americans to get vaccinated. Tthe mandates had been slated to go into effect in January as the President faces the reality that roughly 45 million American adults are still unvaccinated -- and are unlikely to be persuaded by his arguments.